Hi-- a brief (re)introduction

 I love seeing new names in the comments section, so I thought I'd back up and say HELLO to anyone new around here.

First of all, SORRY FOR THE TYPOS. My eyes are getting worse and worse, and I can never find glasses, and I never really learned to type properly because I am a gen x-er. 

OK-- here are the quick facts:

I have five kids: Harry(18), a college freshman; Jack (16), a junior in high school; Cooper (13), a 7th-grader; Dorothy (11), a 6th-grader; and Minnie (4), a preschooler.

We have a brand new puppy named Annabel. She's a cavapoo and was born on 8/24.

I am married to Ben, my high school and college sweetheart (we met at speech camp when we were 14 and 15). He is an academic, too, but an administrator, and he works out of town 3 days (2 nights) a week.

I had Harry and Jack when I was getting my PhD and the other 3 after I had settled into my full-time teaching faculty job.

We generally have... a lot... going on, and I like to use this blog to complain about... all of it.

I write about money on Mondays because we are trying to be smarter about how we use ours. Every month, I post a reading round up because I have made an effort since 2013 to read at least 100 books a year. I am a huge feminist and probably politically to the left of you because I am politically to the left of everyone I know even in a super lefty area of the state. I study reproductive justice and am doing a lot of thinking about gender and politics these days. I want to be a novelist and have been working on a book about adult mean girl friendships in the WI suburbs forever. I try to comment on blogs for 20 minutes a day and also sometimes reply to comments on this blog but I am bad at that and getting better. I always want to be thinner and younger looking, color my hair at home, am contemplating botox and maybe new boobs, am very anxious most of the time and generally always think I have a fatal ailment of some sort. I AM SO FUN AT PARTIES YOU GUYS.

Anyway, welcome.